For the third year running, in lieu of a fall vacation, the changing of the seasons has brought a different sort of break to students in Carnegie Mellon University's School of Drama. Rather than taking time off, the school's dramats faced the challenge of preparing dozens of short productions for their annual "Playground" series of performances.

Amid homecoming's other special events -- class reunions, a performance of "A Chorus Line" and even a "dive-in movie" screening of "Pirates of the Caribbean" in the university's pool -- "Playground's" showcase of nearly 40 short pieces, each 45 minutes at most, ran from Friday to Sunday evening.

Open to the public for no charge, the event included music, film and theater, all conceived, rehearsed and performed in a single week. This snapshot of eight Sunday performances is a testament to the breadth and ambition of the event.

Sunday's slate kicked off an hour later than Saturday's, though theater at 11 a.m. remains rare enough.

That performance, "Alice in Wonderland: The Mad Hatter's Tea Party," was taken almost verbatim from author Lewis Carroll's text, and its staging, with just four players moving from setting to setting at a table set for 18, highlighted the original manic absurdity of Wonderland vividly enough.

"Playground" is somehow instinctively an arts event built for consideration in total. The lobby of the school's Purnell Center was filled with festival attendees after that first performance, at least half of whom would make it at least to the dinner break, some seven performances and five hours later. Each performance has the individual effect of a potato chip, this one selling the next, until an entire bowl, or afternoon, is consumed.

The next piece was a film presentation titled "Jack the Ripper," a confusing romp through three logically unrelated stories. By lunchtime, staged drama returned with the romantic comedy "Houstaraunt," which notably showcased K.C. Wright and Will Brill's skills in summoning appropriately tentative and tender interplay as momentarily distant lovers who find their way back to solid ground in tandem.

This was followed by another film of a decidedly different character. "Post-Secret," the result of a community art project that called for anonymous postcards confessing a single secret, projected submissions ranging from trite to tragic for a few seconds each. "I hate graceful people" preceded "when I'm angry with my brother I spit in his shoes," giving way to "I'm tired of taking pills to make me feel better" and "I called it rape to justify the abortion."

Perhaps most daunting among the day's performances was a 40-minute abbreviation of "Closer," well-known as both a play and a film but which held up well in this version starring Brill, Lara Hillier, Steffi Garrard and Tristan Farmer. The use of evocative musical interludes ranging from Fiona Apple to Linkin Park and concentrated performances all around contributed to an efficiently claustrophobic emotional impact.

The brief farce "Box Office" was actually performed by box-office staff in the box-office space itself, lambasting stupid questions from imaginary patrons and lamenting lost office supplies. Then "Death on Flagler" attempted, rather ambitiously, the metaphor of Ionesco's "Rhinoceros" balanced against a tragic coming-out story, with mixed results.

The last show before dinner was "Looking Back," a cabaret-ish Billy Joel of a jaunt through the romantic longings of a young man, unspooled by musician Ben Goldberg from a guitar, a piano, his voice and a small bedroom set.

Despite restricting its performers to "only a performance venue, limited rehearsal time and zero budget," an eight-show sample of the festival provided ample evidence of the depth and quality possible in such a format -- and of the all-around daring of these student-performers.